Every day, thousands of visitors flock to the zoo in the Iranian city of Mashhad to see the tigress Maya and her trainer Mohsen with their own eyes. Having raised the Bengal tiger, he is the only one that Maya listens to. From feeding and stroking to playful fighting, the predator tolerates her foster father’s presence in the enclosure. When Maya is allowed to leave the zoo for a short period to star in a film, she’s sent to an empty tiger farm on the Caspian Sea. Between shooting dates, Mohsen allows her to run around in the almost deserted landscape. With the freedom to roam around without bars for the first time in her life, the animal’s suppressed instincts rise to the surface. But their sobering return, and the revelation of frightening incidents at the zoo, casts a new light on their relationship. With an extraordinary approach to the protagonist and the predator, the filmmakers highlight the complex and questionable fascination with the domestication of wild animals.
The zoo, like the cinema, is a space designed with exhibition in mind and from its inception cinema and video has exploited this space from the Lumiere brothers film ‘Lion’ shot in 1895 to the first Youtube video ‘Me at the Zoo’ in 2005. Maya sits within a continuation of cinema’s fascination with zoos where the act of looking is turned on its head as the animals look back at us.
Language: Farsi
Subtitles: English, Estonian
- Name in Original Language: Maya
- Director: Jamshid Mojaddadi, Anson Hartford
- Country: UK
- Year: 2020
- Length: 86 min
- Cinematography: Reza Jafarzadeh, Majid Tahermanesh, Nick Booth
- Editing: Ollie Huddleston
- Production: Banyak Films, Co-Producer Ladan Anoushfar
Showtimes:
- Online Elisa Stage: Tue 2.02 - Sun 7.02